May 13, 2013

(This is a draft of an article for Dance & Theatre Journal (UK)...but it is way too long for them so I am also seeking other sites for distribution...your comments and suggestions are very welcome, especially via email. thanks.)

848 was an artist-run, collective art
space and home in San Francisco. Inspired by Tim Miller and Linda
Burnham at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, I went to an
Alternate ROOTS gathering at the site of the original Black Mountain
College in the summer of ‘91. I met people who were fusing
community-based art-making with social justice work, devising
original works for the stage across genres, and having a very
developed conversation on race that I wasn’t having in San
Francisco. That fall, some friends moved out of a funky, second
floor, commercial space on Divisadero Street. In Nov 1991, Michael
“Med-O” Whitson, Todd Eugene and I adopted the space and its
name. In a windowless 1100 sq ft studio, with moveable risers that
seated fewer than 50 people, we hosted a weekly Contact Improvisation
jam and hundreds of performances, concerts, exhibitions, and parties
emerging as a vibrant site for cultural experimentation. Very early
on it became a sex radical space, which organized safe-sex parties
and safer-sex education inspired by sex-positive feminism, pagan
ritual, and AIDS and queer activism. Todd moved out within the first
year and Jess Curtis moved in. With Jess and others, I lived at 848
for 10 years, on and off, but mostly on. During my last five years at
848, approximately 10,000 people a year came through the space.

“When the three founders of 848
(Med-O, Todd Eugene, and myself) first met, I was very clear that I
wanted our new space to include sex events within the spiritual
artist activist weave. Specifically, I wanted a place to hold
experiential, naked, queer workshops and rituals focussed on sexual
healing. The previous year, Jack Davis and I had started
Phallic/Image, a ‘school’ for trainings in safer sex, creativity
and spirituality for queer men. Inspired by the work of Joe Kramer
and Body Electric, we decided to offer low cost, pagan-based events
that affirmed gay sex. As the faggot liberationist, goddess honoring,
anarchist grandchildren of Wilhelm Reich, Emma Goldman, Betty Dodson,
Walt Whitman and The Living Theater, we wanted nothing less than the
abolition of sex shame, HIV ignorance, homophobia, male rigidity,
rape and sexual violence, and closeted love. Our work emerged from
the common field nurtured by feminism, body and earth based
spiritualities, gay lib, contemporary art movements, radical
environmentalism and anti-racist/civil rights organizing. We were
leftist community organizers offering group sex and intimacy in a
ritual setting. And we discovered that there was a shortage of places
to do this work.{...}
Thus the first “sex events” at 848 were born.”

In 848’s Fall ‘94 calendar, Med-O
and I wrote, “We’ve provided an essential public space for
several micro-communities, including those that operate at the queer
edges of society, dance-based performers, body-based women visual
artists, and more. What next? We want a bigger gallery/theater, with
room for more people to live in community. We want to be an evolving
resource for artists creatively manipulating hard core political
issues that make the city hell to live in. We know that sexual
liberation sells more tickets and gets more press than class war
activism. We dance in this schism and get as subversive as necessary
to pollinate both fields with the wisdom of the other. Aware of the
incessant violence in all directions, we look for work that makes
life worth living”

Pioneering Fusions of Sex & Art
at 848 Community Space (1991-2005)

SF has always been a hotspot for sexual
libertines. It's a port town. It's a home base for prostitutes and
returning soldiers. It's a pioneer town. We have streets named after
hookers and brothel owners. It's about Beats and Hippies and social
and political dissidents. It's about people escaping mainstreams
established by New England puritans. SF has been a magnet for US and
international LGBT refugees for generations.

Then AIDS.

SF was hit hard, becoming an epicenter
of both the pandemic and the activist-artistic mobilization it
inspired. Most of the sex activity at 848 in the early 90s was a
direct response to AIDS. We were forced to rethink sex and the
relationship of gay sex to community. The Queen of Heaven1
parties and many other sex positive happenings were framed as safer
sex events. The court ordered closing of SF bathhouses in 1984 was a
homophobic response to AIDS; an opportunity for closed minded and
homophobic citizens to backlash and scapegoat gay men for having
pleasure palaces. The defense of the safer sex party in this
historical context was that people in public, having sex in front of
friends and strangers, would be more likely to follow the new
community ethic of using condoms. All of the sex or play parties at
848 had some kind of monitor or host that made condoms and lube
readily available, as well as gloves, saran wrap for eating pussy and
ass, and a generally convivial environment for changing our sex
habits and behaviors.

The people who led sex events or
rituals at 848 were also artists: dancers, performance artists,
writers and visual artists. These artist-sexpert-organizers included
Carol Queen and Robert Lawrence, Jack Davis and myself, Ann
Rosencranz, Jess Curtis, Matthew Simmons (aka Peggy L’eggs),
Patrick Califia2,
the folks from Black Leather Wings3,
Mark I Chester and others. The people engaged in radical sex
practices, whether they were gay or not, were heavily impacted by
AIDS - by friends getting sick, by the activism, by the work to
re-imagine sexual community. In queer scenes no one was untouched, no
one was unmoved. Artists and dancers have always been a part of
communities where sexual experimentation, faggotry and
non-heteronormative sexual relations and practices have been
celebrated or explored. A disproportionate number of male dancers are
gay and bisexual, so the dance community was deeply implicated in the
struggle with AIDS and the efforts to reclaim visibility, solidarity,
and pride during the sex wars of the 80s.

The styles, genres and political
tactics of performance that happened at 848 were influenced not only
by contact improvisation and the experimental wing of the
contemporary dance scene, but also by feminist and queer performance,
the experimental drag scene, and visual art by radical lesbians,
gays, transfolk, bisexuals, poly and leather folk.

In the early 90s in the Bay Area, a
super vibrant feminist and dyke scene blossomed in both the dance and
queer performance scenes. Young feminists had come of age during the
sex wars of the 80s, their politics formed in the conflicts between
sex positive and sex worker positive feminists and the feminists who
prioritized a radical critique of rape culture and anti-pornography.
Among these young women who organized and/or performed at events at
848 were Stanya Kahn, Stephanie Maher & Kathleen Hermesdorf,
Kneejerk, The Femme Show (which was followed by the Butch and Switch
group shows), Madrone aka Kim Jack, Lisi DeHaas, Pearl Ubungen, and
Miriam Kronberg. Miriam was central in creating the women’s
performance space LunaSea, one of several spaces whose founding was
inspired by 8484.

There is a crucial history of bisexual
leadership in sex liberation and sex worker activism in SF that is
rarely acknowledged. From BiPol5,
Society of Janus6,
and COYOTE7
in the 70s, to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Human Sexuality,
and most specifically their training for the SF Sex Info call line,
there have been countless bisexuals who have been key to sex worker,
BDSM, LGBT, feminist and queer art, healing, and organizing. Many of
these people came through 848, producing events, telling their
stories through performance, having sex, making videos, attending
visual and performance art events.

Queer and sexual cultures, at least in
the Bay Area, seemed more engaged with dancers and dance performance
than with theater. It’s a common observation that dance, sexuality,
and gender are grounded in bodily performance and experience. Also
dance tends towards more porous borders than theater - or maybe
that’s just how I’ve experienced it in San Francisco. And I mean
more porous borders with performance art, experimental theater,
burlesque and erotic performance. Dance is mythically linked with sex
work: strippers, sexy dancing, belly dancing, skirt dancers, dancers
as escorts, the revealed legs of women in tights dancing men’s
roles in Ballet...going as far back as our fantastical and
orientalist imagining of ancient temple dancing. Dancing is a form of
sexual and erotic performance. Feminist and queer performance pushed
the limits of nudity and sexual imagery in art, revealing a mutual
influence between dance, body-based performance and radical sex
cultures.

In Bay Area performance history, nudity
is “natural”, what dance theorist André Lepecki referred to as a
“utopic project,”8
more under the influence of Isadora Duncan and Anna Halprin. This
contrasts with the more confrontational nudity in New York of The
Living Theater and Richard Schechner’s ‘Dionysus’ in 69. Even
the softcore “O Calcutta” by Kenneth Tynan which opened
Off-Broadway in 1969 was more prurient sexy than Halprin’s 1965
“Parades and Changes” in which the dancers dressed and undressed
repeatedly. Nudity in Bay Area performance in the 90s was influenced
as much by a post-Halprin, Bay Area casualness as by the shock
tactics typical of some feminist and queer performance. At 848,
nudity and sexual imagery in visual art and performance were both
frequent and contested.

(from More Out Than In, 1995)

The body. The body. The body. It’s
only a body. My god, it’s a body! The dance comes from the body.
The dance comes through the body. The personal body. The animal body.
The collective body. The earth body. The universal body. The specific
body. Great and not-so-great artists have by stripping the body,
exposing the body, studying the body forever. Etienne Decroux, the
great teacher of corporeal mime, had his students rehearse in loin
cloths before there was any conversation about sexual revolution.
From Michelangelo to Anna Halprin, The Living Theater and Pilobolus
we’ve been given the naked body as form, as objet d’art, as
subject, as being, as beautiful reflection, as perfection, as human,
as goddess.

I believe that contemporary
performance audiences are much more concerned about formal
experiments in the theater, e.g performers entering the audience,
shows with no conceivable structure, improvisation and/or audience
participation, than with nudity on stage. Yet presenters repeatedly
put warnings on the door where i perform alerting the potential
audience to ‘mature themes and nudity’. Recently at a gig
produced by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis I added ‘and lots
of improvisation’ to the warnings in the lobby.

When Jack Davis and I started the
Phallic/Image events there were very few spaces that wanted to host
this work. For political events at that time we frequented the
Women's Building (a women owned and operated community centre) but
they, understandably, didn't want to host a naked men's cock worship
event. We ended up in dance studios because that's where I had
connections. When we started 848 I asserted to my two hetero male
collaborators that the space had to be available to my workshops with
Jack and other sexual healing or erotic arts events. As West Coast
anarchists, this was a non-issue. As soon as various people in the
sex community found out that the space was available and cheap, we
had many requests. Our relationships to many sex and body pioneers
came from simply opening the doors.

As I recall it, the radical sex folks
found me more than I found them. They came to performances and
attended workshops. Affinities flowed. In 1985 I was invited into a
life-changing collaborative project with Sara Shelton Mann. The
result was a punk-influenced dance about love, gender, and violence
called ‘Evol’, which revitalized Sara’s company Contraband. The
first review about ‘Evol’ was by Mark I Chester in the gay
(men’s) paper, Bay Area Reporter. Besides being an occasional art
critic Chester was, and still is, a noted photographer who documents
the underground BDSM scene in San Francisco. And then some of the
first fans and supporters of my solo performance (starting with
Saliva in 1988) were from the leather scene. They weren’t the gay
sweater clones who were too afraid to come to an illegal, under a
SOMA freeway performance where I smeared myself in audience spit and
danced in a black jockstrap, boots, and a leather jacket painted with
Dead Animal Skin on the back. Internationally recognised Kink
educator, Cleo Dubois was with Mark Chester at the initial Contraband
performances. She took performance workshops at 848 and then
performed there both solo and with her partner Fakir Musafar, the
father of the modern primitive movement. Carol Queen and Fakir were
very quick to rent 848 for their sex/ritual/fetish events following
the visibility of the gay men’s sex/intimacy workshops that I
facilitated with Jack Davis. Carol, with her partner Robert Lawrence,
was already hosting sex parties, within a context of pangender and
poly organizing that had historic roots in SF bisexual community and
activism. Their Queen of Heaven parties moved to 848 around 1992 or
93. Mark, Carol, Jack, Cleo and Fakir were all connected through
underground BDSM, public sex party, and Radical Faerie scenes. Their
involvement in the space as both artists and sex event organizers
were instrumental in 848’s reputation as a site for
community-based experiments in both radical sex and contemporary art
and performance. I felt recognized as a fellow freak or outsider,
someone wanting to live at the extremes of bodily and social
experience, even if my primary practice wasn't in a sexual context
but a theatrical dance and performance context.

Methodology: four stories moving
between sex and art

There were some key practices and
experiences to which many of us were first exposed in group sexual
healing contexts that had direct impact on our dancing and
performance making. These included intense breathwork, the
de-privatizing of sexual or intimate bodily experience, and the
expansion or unmaking of bodily limitation, e.g., recontextualizing
endurance, pain, ecstasy, and social relations. Crediting the
development of artistic and social practices, like all history
making, involves a network of personal narratives and positioned
perspectives. Here are a few stories:

one

Joe Kramer is a sexual healing pioneer,
the founder of The Body Electric School, and responsible for
professionalizing and legalizing sexological bodywork. Kramer adapted
the Rebirthing(tm) breath practice to his “Taoist” Erotic
Massage. There was a resonance with ReBirthing to Stan Grof’s
Holotropic breathwork which was introduced by Neil MacLean to my
community of friends in DIY healing rituals. In both of these breath
practices there is a ‘breather’ and a masseur or support person.
I have adapted these consciousness shifting and ecstasy-instigating
breath practices into a para-theatrical improvisation ritual in which
a group assumes both roles of client/healer or breather/sitter with
everyone breathing and everyone looking out for everyone. Full
connected breath, trying to overdose on oxygen, for one hour or more,
with dynamic music playing...while dancing, jumping, pushing,
running, hugging, spinning, holding... This ritual is part of a
series of exercises and events that constitute Potential Shamanic
Action, a five-day laboratory for dancers and performers that I have
taught in various contexts, mostly in Europe, since 2007.

two

Wanting to nurture mutual influence
between sexual healing and contemporary dance scenes, Jess Curtis &
Stephanie Maher developed bonesex, a series of exercises rooted in
Contact Improvisation and somatic dance practices. The work, which
included clothing optional dancing, involved a rigorous, experiential
study of touch and sensation, or what Curtis refers to as “the
physics of sensual pleasure.” Jess has continued to develop this
work at Felix Ruckert’s space Schwelle 7 in Berlin as well as in
the nomadic Touch & Play Festival instigated by Daniel Hayes. The
recent programming at Schwelle 7 and Touch & Play are very much
resonant with the sex and art, dance and BDSM, experiments at 848 in
the 90s. In a 2011 promotion, Curtis writes that the Bonesex workshop
is intended to “Develop tools to allow your sexual body to safely
inform all of your dancing.”9

three

After an experience with flogging at
The Body Electric School in the early 90s, I developed an exercise
that I continue to explore in dance workshops and laboratories for
creating new performance. In a three-on-one whole body hitting score,
participants start with light tapping and escalate to hard slaps.
Like a gradual, or graduated flogging session, the slow start helps
both to trigger endorphins (useful when the “pain” increases) and
to deconstruct the emotional or psychological implications of hitting
and being hit. In a BDSM context, the exercise would be considered
light, an introduction. For others unfamiliar with negotiated pain or
power play, the escalating intensity of the slaps is provocative and
generative on many levels. One person’s experience might focus on
whole body sensation while another is pushed to personal limits of
intimacy, pain, or fear. Memory of previous violence or fear of
violence can be triggered. The exercise becomes an opportunity to
teach or utilize tools for sensing, moving and grounding energy.
Overlapping certain shamanic or contemplative practice with SM
practices, I use the exercise to recontextualize pain and intense
bodily experience, as well as to magnify blood and energy flow
throughout the body (and by body I mean whole bodymindetc).

four

The Oil Action, which I first
encountered at Touch & Play (Berlin, Schwelle 7, 2010), has
become an ongoing practice among some of friends and dance colleagues
in the Bay Area. Also, the Oil Action, as performance and ritual
research, directly influenced my recent project Turbulence (a dance
about the economy). Naked, eyes closed, and covered in warm coconut
oil, we writhe and tumble, sliding into an altered social
relationship that challenges the normative economies of lover,
family, community, and culture. Participants report experiences of
not knowing where their body ended and another’s began, or not
knowing what part of another’s body was touching them, or how many
bodies, or how much time had passed, or where one was in a room, or
how good it can feel to not know anything except warmth, moisture,
and contact, or how lonely one felt while anonymous in a mass. The
practice stimulates physical and conceptual experimentation, as well
as inspiring community and friendship.

I started teaching for Body Electric in
1989, during the peak decade of AIDS before protease inhibitors. I
joined a community of gay and bi men actively surviving the AIDS
pandemic while trying to re-imagine male-male sexuality as healing.
My work at Body Electric combined whatever I was doing and learning
with Contraband, at 848, and among my artist and anarchist circles of
friends, with the gay sexual healing practices developed by Joe
Kramer and the teachers he curated. I was always looking for ways to
bring the personal healing work into a more ritual and social change
context, to politicize group practice as social movement. Following
my experiences, several of my friends decided to participate in Body
Electric’s sexual healing trainings. This included women and
hetero-ish men once BE started offering workshops outside of gay male
exclusive contexts. Most of these friends then instigated their own
events at 848, furthering a cross-pollination of people and practices
between 848’s more artist-centered culture and Body Electric’s
approach to queer sexual healing, pleasure, and liberation.

Some of us took courses or attended
rituals that others developed while many of us created our own
practices and contexts. For some of us the overlap of sex and art
practices and communities is a life-long project. For others, it was
more of a phase or an intense period when 848 sex events,
AIDS-influenced safer sex parties and sexual healings, Body Electric,
Queen of Heaven, Radical Faeries, Black Leather Wings, and Annie
Sprinkle were collectively creating a more saturated sex/art scene
than most of us experience in our daily lives today.

These stories remind me of the ongoing
influence of Wilhelm Reich’s proposal that free bodies must be
sexually free. It was first with Reich, and then re-imagined through
feminism and gay liberation, that I learned to recognized the
politics of sexual oppression, to recognize that how people’s
sexuality is controlled (limited, named, surveilled, punished) will
directly influence their political voice, or subjectivity. Frank
Wilderson (Incognegro, 201010)
complicates this understanding of sexual or bodily freedom by
indicting sexual liberation’s embodiment of white privilege and
white supremacy. The always unfinished projects of liberation
challenge Reich’s theories but do not completely dismiss them. How
is sexual repression linked to spiritual repression linked to
political repression? How can some people’s liberation depend on
others’ oppression or is it true that until we’re all free, no
one is free? Queers and feminists of color, in fields ranging from
sex work to academic research, political organizing, burlesque and
performance art, have consistently labored in the cross-hairs of
optimism and pessimism that mark the naked body in public. For over a
decade, artists and teachers at 848, experimented with queer and
feminist performance, public intimacy, experimental dance, and
communal celebrations as part of a larger utopian project to host a
liberated space, however imperfect or temporal or invisible.

848 was
a thriving site in the queer zeitgeist of the early 90s, hosting the
emergence of artists from previously underground communities,
including BDSM practitioners, sex workers, transgender men, femme
dykes, and bisexuals, among other burgeoning communities activated by
internet organizing, a new queer cinema, third wave feminism, and
AIDS activism. Because the space was so cheap to rent and easy to
use, and because many of these emerging communities or social
contexts did not have social centers of their own, 848 hosted
countless queer and sex radical organizers who curated events far
beyond the imaginations of the core artist collective at 848. These
performance events, especially the group shows in which several short
performances were featured in a single evening, were witness to
unpredictable genre and community blurring. BDSM practitioners “came
out” with intense images and actions that referenced both body art
and identity politics narratives. Many an individual artist and
ensemble created their first performance works at 848. And many an
established artist shifted their practice to create works for events
specifically themed around sex, gender, and sexuality. Choreographers
experimented with play piercing and flogging, dominatrixes
experimented with personal narratives, rape survivors wrote
monologues about sexual healing, improv jazz musicians got naked,
drag queens MC’d for non-queer events, heterosexuals created queer
performance, kink writers moved from reading their work to adding
elements of sensual and sexual performance...

There
were two events in particular that blew apart our perceptions of what
could happen at the intersections of queer, art, sex, ritual,
community, and performance. The first did not happen at 848 but its
influence traveled north from Los Angeles in the bodies and
experiences of several Bay Area participants. “Rites of Ecstasy and
Transformation” at Highways in Santa Monica, was curated by Doug
Sadownick. The weekend festival brought together SM performers from
Club Fuck, modern primitive ritualists, and performance artists from
both LA and San Francisco. Ron Athey and friends performed ritualized
piercing and bleeding for the first time outside of a nightclub. Jess
Curtis and Jules Beckman participated as dancer and drummer in a
communal ball dance hosted by Fakir Musafar in collaboration with his
partner Cleo Dubois and members of the Black Leather Wings community.
The ball dance is based in part on a ritual practice in Savite Hindu
culture during which metal balls or limes are sewn to the skin of the
participants who dance into a pain-transmuting endurance trance. One
of several performers at the festival, I climbed into the rafters of
the low-ceiling warehouse theater wearing only a jock, a climbing
harness, and some boots. Referencing Schneeman’s “Interior
Scroll,” I read a text pulled from (a condom inside) my ass as I
floated, suspended above the audience. The encounters between body
art, post colonial ritual, community practice, and queer performance
set an example and provoked a series of questions, which continued to
engage many of us for several years.

The
second legendary event worth mentioning here was Loren Cameron’s
photo exhibit “Our Vision, Our Voices: Transsexual Portraits and
Nudes” in 1994. Recognizing that transgender bodies were primarily
documented by cis-gender (non-trans) fetishists, whether sexual or
medical, Cameron dedicated several years to documenting his own and
other trans people's bodies and lives. When no other gallery in San
Francisco would present the work, Cameron came to 848 and
self-produced the exhibit, buying the track lighting that shifted 848
from an empty room with good intentions to an actual gallery. The
opening featured readings and performances by acclaimed gender outlaw
Kate Bornstein, leading trans advocate Jamison Green (of FTM
International), among others. When over 200 people showed up, we
jammed more than 100 into the space while another 100 waited
patiently on the sidewalk for nearly 90 minutes, cued down the block,
and then the entire program was repeated for this second audience.
The mood was electric. Most of us - cis and trans - had never been in
the presence of this many transgender people at one time. The show
was reviewed in The New Yorker which brought it national acclaim but
it also revealed the emerging power of the internet in shifting
public discourse and visibility for marginalized communities,
identities and bodily practices. Cameron's work was expanded into a
second exhibit at 848 in 1995, that was eventually published by Cleis
in 1996 as “Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits.” David
Harrison's ground breaking performance “FTM” also premiered at
848 in 1994, part of the ground swell of trans male cultural
production, activism, and social networking that marked the mid-90s.
That my partners at 848 (Curtis & Whitson) were hetero men
(influenced by hippy anarchist queer feminist ethics) will probably
not register in any queer or trans histories but I think it was no
accident that a space marked as gay or lesbian was not where trans
male artists first found, if not a home, then a space to take over.
In San Francisco that space was 848.

Research: Dance, Intimacy, Pleasure,
Culture

Dancing at 848 had two primary
influences, Contact Improvisation and Contraband. 848 hosted a weekly
CI jam started by Stephane Maher in 1993 or 94. That jam continues on
Tuesdays at CounterPULSE 20 years later. Contact Improvisation, as
instigated by Steve Paxton in the early 70s and developed in
collective and community contexts since then, is primarily a duet
dance, in which dancers improvise around an ever-shifting point of
contact between their two bodies. It is necessarily intimate and
close, involving deep bodily listening (or physical awareness) to
self and partner. More horizontal and circular than vertical, the
dancing-by-touching in CI challenges hierarchies and meanings of
bodily value, i.e., head rolling across thigh as dancers yield to
gravity, or shoulder pushing into butt as one dancer lifts another.
Despite Paxton’s insistence to focus on physics rather than biology
as a way to decenter or unfocus the potential sexuality of dancing,
many of us have learned more about intimate touch through CI than
from our romantic and sexual partners. For some of us, CI is a
postmodern approach towards enhanced intimacy, unrestricted by
Modernity’s heteronormativity. The emerging sexual healing scenes
that emerged at 848 during the first decade of AIDS offered a place
to share this queer sensibility, to crossover from the CI subculture
to the radical sex subculture. The CI jams at 848, and in the Bay
Area in the 90s, were non-static, research-based, sites for
experimentation. In addition to working on physical feats and
sensitivity, we used CI as a ground for considering sex and intimacy,
political subjectivity, spiritual and contemplative practice, healthy
anatomy and biology, therapeutic potentials, feminism, white
privilege and exclusivity, notions of community, resistance to
mainstream culture.

The Contraband influence was grounded
in the pioneering work of choreographer and researcher Sara Shelton
Mann and then extended by other members of the company who were
actively teaching and performing in the 90s especially Kim Epifano,
Julie Kane, Jules Beckman, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Shannon McMurchy, and
848 co-directors and residents Jess Curtis and Keith Hennessy. Mann’s
work combined modern dance, release techniques and somatic practices,
CI and other forms of dance improvisation, talking, objects, drawing,
engaged collaborations with musicians and visual artists, and
psycho-spiritual practices. Mann introduced at least three
generations of Bay Area dancers to various kinds of meditation and
mind-body-spirit-energy practices for which she has a voracious
appetite, learning from one Chi Gung master to the next new age
healer to the next explorer of consciousness. At 848, an encounter
between dance and sexual healing practices revealed a wide open field
of possibilities for making performance.

An enormous number of dancers were
active at 848, and much of the richness of the space was generated by
its inclusivity, or lack of exclusivity. The space was simultaneously
cliquey, suggesting a home base for a particular group of friends,
but also radically accessible as the cheapest theater in San
Francisco. Outside of the previously mentioned influences that
impacted the dance culture at 848 were Pearl Ubungen, Robert Henry
Johnson, Osseus Labyrint, OnSite Dance Company, Rick Darnell &
The High Risk Group, Zeltzman & Coburn and many others.

More Out Than In: Points of
Contention

In 1995, Rachel Kaplan and I decided to
publish a zine to make public the gossipy debate about the
intersections of sex and art at 848 Community Space. We wanted to
challenge the critiques that seemed sex negative or that implied that
artistic research and production was being trumped by sex
programming. As well, we wanted to give voice to the complaints by
inviting a more formal articulation and accountability that published
writing offers. We received so many texts that we decided to publish
a book, one of four small press projects released by our own
Abundant Fuck Publications. The title More Out Than In reflected
a common sentiment around issues of community and clique, as well as
being a joke about how much sex really happened at the space.

The following section introduces four
points of contention internal to the organizing collective11
and among the larger community of artists and sex educators who used
the space. Quotes are from my 1995 essay in More Out Than In.
My intention with that essay was both to respond to criticism as well
as to situate criticism within a larger struggle of community-based
arts organizing and the tensions between DIY grassroots and
non-profit institutions.

The 848 calendar: our public face

848’s monthly calendar would list
performances, exhibitions, the weekly Contact jam, and various
sex/intimacy events. The latter distinguished the space from all
other art spaces and could be quite provocative. Clothing optional
and assertively gay or queer, these events shifted how the dance and
other art events at the space were perceived. Frequently the art on
the walls, which stayed up during performances and jams as part of an
integrated gallery experience, featured naked bodies or sexual
themes. There was an ongoing friction about the sexual expliciteness
of the space, which prompted an ongoing question about how much to
share with a broader public through the calendar. “Though the
ratio of sex specific programming at 848 has increased in the past
three years, i noted, as well that the overall volume of programming
has increased considerably. {...} I’m often afraid to show the
calendar because of the prevalence of sex related events. I’m
afraid of freaking people out. {...} sometimes it’s weird enough
having a septum ring when I enter cross cultural dialogue, let alone
try to convince foundations to fund us. The irony is that the
calendar got more sexually explicit after we received our first grant
from the SF Art Commission. Who wants to be the next poster child for
perversion paraded before an economically terrified populace? Not
me.”

Perceiving BDSM

“Artists and audiences who had no
connection to the sex events were troubled that BDSM was even
happening in the space. (...) At the Queen of Heaven parties, we
began to stage the downstairs (a squatted storefront) as the SM space
– separating it from the general sex play area.”

BDSM is hugely misunderstood by most
non-practitioners and it provides a vibrant screen for all kinds of
traumatic projection. Additionally, there are folks who have either
participated in or studied BDSM but disapprove. Some disapprove of
the physical and relational practices and others are confronted by
BDSM’s representations of sexism, violence, and torture. At 848 we
bragged that anything could happen. For $100 a night we handed the
keys to the space to almost anyone. The NEA12
censorship battles of the late 80s and early 90s implicated queer and
feminist performance (NEA four), BDSM (Mapplethorpe), AIDS activism,
and religious critique (Serrano, Wojnarowicz). No one in the 848
collective was active in or identified with BDSM scenes when we
started the space, but we knew which side of history we wanted to be
on with regards to censorship, whether sexual or artistic. Several
writers in More Out Than In shared their pro, con, and
ambivalent positions on BDSM and this public airing softened the
conflict for many of the key critics.

Funding (money for sex not for art)

One of the rumors about 848 was that
grant money intended for artistic programming was subsidizing sex
events. The opposite was more true, that money raised through sex
events subsidized artistic programming. And of course, much of the
848 programming blurred the distinctions between art and sex. 848
regularly presented (or rented out to) sex and sexuality themed
performances and exhibitions, as well as art themed events for queer
and sex-identified communities including sex workers, BDSM
communities, and Radical Faeries. “Whether or not we were
spending grant money that came to support arts programming on sex
events (we weren't, and in fact sex events raised money that
supported general infrastructure (rent, utilities...)”

Sex versus Race and Class, the
challenge with intersection

The core organizers at 848 were mostly
white, raised in mostly white contexts. Michael Whitson, whose
grandfather is Choctaw, was the only non-white member of the core
collective. Raised in mostly white, working to middle class
communities in small town Washington, he was hesitant to foreground
his native ancestry especially if it was perceived as an effort to
deny his white appearance and privilege. Like most progressive white
artist collectives in the 90s we made considerable effort at outreach
to artists of color. These efforts were sometimes successful for a
single event and we did establish a few ongoing relationships with
artists and curators of color. Generally, however, it was difficult
to get past tokenism and temporary multiculturalism. Sadly, most of
our white constituency didn’t notice, while most people of color
considered 848 to be a white space. As organizers we lamented “...the
lack of race/class activism or awareness within the mostly white sex
lib scenes, or the sex events being more focused on personal pleasure
than social change...” This lament was challenged by white
queers including Jack Davis who wrote in More Out Than In, “I do
not have the privilege of thinking that my sexuality is not
political” and “being publicly queer is political.”

Sustainable threads: from then to
now

Of the many ways we might consider the
current moment, one is a historical thread of feminist, queer and
sex/erotic art that extends from the celebratory breakthroughs of the
late 70s, coming of age during the political intensity of the AIDS
era, and arriving in the new millenium sanctioned by both academia
and (limited) foundation funding. Pre-dating 848 by a decade, the
mere presence of a noted porn star, Annie Sprinkle, in a “reputable”
art or performance space was a provocation. Obviously there has been
some movement, change, progress, and drift...

I recognize sustainable threads from
848’s more radical experimentation to some of the activities at
CounterPULSE13
and in the ongoing local ecology that includes a wide range of queer
performance tactics, cliques and contexts (including ‘This Is What
I Want’). CounterPULSE is clearly not 848, and the de-privatizing
of sex and sexual healing is not on their agenda. But in 2011-12
CounterPULSE hosted several artists working at the intersection of
queer sex and art including: post-colonial burlesque artist Xandra
Ibarra, extensive nudity and onstage pissing in my own project
Turbulence (a dance about the economy), Seth Eisen’s portrait of
queer pioneer and pornographer Sam Steward, and appearances by
sex-ecologist-artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens. The images
and actions of these artists have both visible and invisible threads
linking them to a previous generation when queer sex and live art
were more actively scrutinized, questioned, punished, or hidden. In
comparison with these recent projects, the often amateurish efforts
at 848 were groundbreaking in setting a context for many of today’s
artists.

The tactics of identity based and
intersectional queer performance that are staples of the annual
National Queer Arts Fest have traceable roots to the performers at
848’s frequent group shows in the 90s. This Is What I Want
is kin, like a younger sibling or cousin, to the many sex and
desire-themed group shows at 848. This is less about praising 848 as
it is an attempt to recognize the larger movement that happened in
performance during the 90s, under the influence of queer uprising,
the cultural response to AIDS, and the shifting tides in the feminist
sex wars. Nationally, 848 was one space among many, with a particular
San Francisco flair with regards to sexual and identity politics,
where dance and performance experimentation thrived and culture was
renewed. Influential mid-career artists, including Jess Curtis and
myself who lived, researched, taught, and performed at 848 for over a
decade, continue to be influenced by the current generation of Bay
Area artists, in a kind of generational feedback loop that is both
generative and frictive.

848 was a laboratory for experiments in
staging desire, for coming out as sexual agents, for using our
personal relationships as impetus for choreographic action, for
exhibiting and viewing naked bodies as provocation, healing,
activism, and delight. We picked up some threads from the pioneers of
sex and art that preceded us. We gave it our best shot. We left a lot
of work undone. And some of that work is now being picked up,
remixed, re-searched and updated.

1
Queen of Heaven was a safer-sex party/orgy/ritual for all genders
and (most) desires. Organized by Carol Queen & Robert Lawrence
in 1991. For more information read Carol’s Real Live Nude Girl:
Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture, Cleis, 1997, 2002.

2
Patrick Califia published several books influential to radical sex
communities in the 80s/90s under the name Pat Califia.

3
“Black Leather Wings is a group of people who since 1989 have
built an ongoing community around exploration of body, BDSM, body
based rituals, sex, sensation and laughter together as they grow
old” -Neon Weiss, long term BLW member.

10Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid,
Frank B. Wilderson, III, South End Press, 2008

11
Founded in 1991 by Michael “Med-O” Whitson, Todd Eugene
and Keith Hennessy but co-directed for most of its history by
Michael “Med-O” Whitson, Jess Curtis, and Keith Hennessy, with
additional collective members or ongoing curators at various times
including K. Ruby, Jack Davis, Tanya Calamoneri, Tracy Vogel, Tara
Brandel.

12
National Endowment for the Arts. The outcome of the censorship
battles around the NEA four, Mapplethorpe, Serrano et al was an end
to funding of individual artists by the federal government. This
policy continues today.

13
CounterPULSE was founded in 2005 by a transitional collective that
included original members of the 848 collective (Whitson, Hennessy),
Chris Carlsson of ShapingSF, as well as Jessica Robinson Love, Sonya
Smith and Ali Woolwich. Under the artistic direction of Jessica
Robinson Love, CounterPULSE has become a thriving mid-level
non-profit producing more queer and cutting edge dance and
performance than any venue in SF. Their current mission statement
opens with “CounterPULSE provides space and resources for emerging
artists and cultural innovators, serving as an incubator for the
creation of socially relevant, community-based art and culture.”

circo zero / performance

Rants, Raves, Reflections, & Revisions

Keith Hennessy blogs occasionally about performance, contemporary dance, and political action, in San Francisco, USA, Europe and beyond. Performance making, teaching and viewing as research and revival. Performance writing as a practice of critical witness, reflection, and discussion.